


all of our sacrifice will not be in vain

by desertplanet



Category: The Last of Us
Genre: Actually Very Fluffy, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Lesbian Relationship, Coping, F/F, Original Character(s), Post-Canon, Rated M for language, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-20
Updated: 2020-12-11
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:27:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 12
Words: 8,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24816841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/desertplanet/pseuds/desertplanet
Summary: Ellie sets off on a journey of healing. Along the way, she discovers that a piece of her shattered past may have miraculously survived. Meanwhile, Riley awakens from a nightmare, carves out a new life for herself, and embarks on her own quest. They meet in the middle.
Relationships: Dina & Ellie (The Last of Us), Ellie/Riley (The Last of Us)
Comments: 27
Kudos: 159





	1. Ellie, in the present

For one horrible moment, she considers burning it all down. The farmhouse, the guitar, even the miniature portraits of Dina and JJ. She doesn’t, of course. She’s just really fucking angry. And sad. And she has never felt more alone in her entire life. There are people who’d tell her that feeling anything at all means progress. But they’d be wrong. The problem isn’t that Ellie doesn’t feel enough. No, she feels too much. Too deeply, too violently. It would be better if she were hollow. Then at least, she wouldn’t hurt anyone.

She regrets almost everything. Even though regret doesn’t mean shit anymore. She wishes she hadn’t killed that woman, with the… She wishes she hasn’t hacked and shot her way through who knows how many people, people who probably didn’t deserve to be hacked and shot through. She wishes she hadn’t left her family, the family she’d fought so hard for. She’s become something...different. Older, wiser. She knows better now. She wishes it all didn’t cost everything that ever fucking mattered to her.

She takes one of her old journals—the one with the most sketches of Dina and JJ—and leaves. She has a pretty good idea where her family went. They’re probably in Jackson now. Who’d want to raise a kid alone in the apocalypse, even on a relatively secure farm? But Ellie can’t go there, not yet. She’s pretty sure she’s fucked up what she had with them (just like everything else). And Tommy… She could always lie and say she did what she said she’d do, but there’s always the possibility some trader or whatever will mention some heavily-muscled girl traveling with a small archer boy. She doesn’t have anywhere to go. But she doesn’t have a choice. She must go all the same. As long as she’s moving, she’s not dead. As long as she’s not dead, she can be useful. To someone. Somewhere. She tries not to think about it too hard.

Ellie shuts the door behind her and drags herself through the sweet-smelling fields of wheat, gilded by the sinking sun. She runs her fingers over the soft, feathery stalks. At the very edge of the farmstead, she turns and takes one last, lingering look at what was once her home. She didn’t burn it down into ash, but she might as well have when she left it the first time.


	2. Riley, in the past

Riley’s father wept as he tore apart her mother. At the time, she thought nothing of it. It was just another horrible, horrible piece of the shattered puzzle that her life became at the start of the pandemic. But now, lying on her back in a locked room, she remembers the tears rolling down his ashen cheeks, mixing with her mom’s blood on the kitchen floor.

  
Once, back at the military preparatory school in Boston, she overheard a couple of older kids talking about how maybe an infected person’s mind is still intact, just trapped within their own body. She thought their theory was horseshit, woven together to scare the younger children, and not-so-politely told them so.

  
Everything comes together, slowly at first and then all at once. Some of the fresher Runners she’s encountered didn’t even attack her. They just huddled in corners or stood perfectly still, eyes wide open and unseeing.

  
Riley lifts her hands to her face. Fuck, those kids were right.

  
She doesn’t remember what happened very well. She recalls a sudden fever setting her nerves aflame. She recalls thrashing on this very floor, screaming at Ellie to lock the fucking door and please, please leave. She pulls her hands away from her face and opens her eyes.

  
Nothing happens, at first. But then the world appears, sudden and dark and hitting her with the force of an axe blow. There’s not much light to see by, only a few rays of gray light sneaking through a boarded-up window and splashing over the floor. Even so, she can tell immediately that her sight’s gone to shit. No surprise; she knows that the fungus attacks the eyes right after the brain. She holds her left arm up. All she sees is a vaguely hand-shaped blob of red and brown and sickening orange-gray. She wiggles her fingers, then her toes. She rolls her neck. She _feels_ fine.

  
She surveys her mildew-stained surroundings. She’s in the basement of what appears to be a library, judging by all the books and carts and files strewn around. There’s a very faint scratching noise, coming from inside the walls. Infected. Must be. She stands, immediately alert. Her feet are planted firmly into the ground, her body coiled to fight or flee.

  
But there aren’t any tortured moans. There isn’t so much as a whimper. Just a light scraping of nails on plaster. Riley focuses, eyes fluttering closed, and turns as if pulled forward by a string. There, at the far end of the room, is a small, blurry brown shape. A mouse or some other rodent, clawing at the wall. It gives the tiniest of squeaks and vanishes into a dark splotch Riley can only assume to be a hole. Her sight may be awful, but the new sharpness of her hearing more than makes up for it.

  
Riley crouches low, feeling her way over the uneven floor until her fingers close around her bag. She slings it over her shoulder, stands once more, and navigates her way to the double doors at the far end of the room. She shoves against it, and something creaks. She pushes harder, until the doors are open just enough for her to glimpse a sliver of decaying wood. Ellie must have shoved a bar of it through the handles.

  
It was obviously enough to keep her trapped for a few days. (No more than a week, probably, or she’d be a Clicker already.) But now that the moisture and heat of New England’s monstrous summer have set in, the bar is more soggy mulch than wood. Must have been soft to begin with. She throws herself against the doors, and this time, they fly open.

  
Adjusting her bag, Riley steps out of the basement, up a rickety flight of stairs, and into the light of a day she never expected to see.


	3. Ellie, in the present

Ellie sighs and kneels into a carpet of rotting leaves. She’s no closer to coming up with a concrete plan than she was five days ago. She’s trapped, caught in limbo. She travels about thirty miles a day, in an uneven circle with Jackson at the center. She makes sure not to stray more than a hundred miles beyond the settlement. Something might happen, and she wants to make sure she’ll be relatively close by if it does. 

She’s spent the past week doing fairly nothing. She hunts for food, picks off the Runners and Stalkers that stumble into her path, and tries not to think about the last year. 

Heaving another sigh, she reaches over and picks up the rabbit she just shot. She’s yanking the arrow out of its chest when a twig snaps behind her. She drops her quarry and whirls around, switchblade flicked open and gleaming. There’s a guy there, maybe a year or two older. The edge of her switchblade is pressed against his stomach by the time her brain catches up with the rest of her.

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” he chokes out, arms pinned beneath her knees. 

“What the fuck do you want?” Ellie snarls. She leans forward, shifting as much of her weight into his gut.

“I was just heading back to the base when I heard rustling. I thought I’d check it out. My girlfriend’s a total carnivore and I—”

She brings the switchblade up to his throat. “Shut the hell up.”

He shuts the hell up. 

“Who are you?” she demands.

“I’m a bounty hunter,” he says. And then amends, very quickly, “We’re not after you.”

Ellie narrows her eyes. “We?”

…

She hates that the first thing she does when she sees the bounty hunters is look for obvious weaknesses and formulate a strategy for taking each one out. The habit’s been drilled deep into her bones, and of course it’s saved her life more times than she can count, but she doesn’t want to be that person anymore. She wants to trust them. She wants to sleep four hours without waking up screaming. These days when she closes her eyes all she can see is Joel’s bashed-in skull, his blood pooling crimson on splintered floorboards. It’s that or Abby’s sunburnt face, disappearing beneath choppy cobalt waves and her own two hands. She wants to be better.

“Allow me to introduce you.” He swings his arm around the camp, pointing at each of his motley companions. “Twelve, Eleven, Ten, Nine, Eight, Seven, Five, Four, Three, Two, and…”

Ellie almost smiles. “...One, I assume.”

One nods, grinning wolfishly. The flickering light of the campfire casts deep shadows over her angular face. “And you are?”

“No one, I guess.”

The entire group laughs. But it’s not jeering; she feels like they’re laughing more with her than at her. 

“How dramatic,” Seven drawls. 

“No one’s _no one,_ ” says Three, popping her head up on a scarred hand. 

Heat that can’t be accounted for by the fire alone rises onto her face. She’s mildly embarrassed. “Ellie. That’s my name.”

Eleven snorts. “Could’ve figured that out on our own.”

Eight pats the seat between herself and Twelve. “Sit down. We have beans galore.”

…

Ellie gives Five, Six’s girlfriend, a rabbit leg. In return, Five hands Ellie a battered can half full of kidney beans. 

“So,” says Ellie, doing her best to make conversation. “Sorry I almost gutted your boyfriend.”

“No worries,” Five and Nine say simultaneously.

Ellie turns on her half-rotted log to face Nine. She looks from them to Five and then to Six. “You three are all with each other?”

Twelve grins at Ellie. Her teeth are shockingly white. “ _All_ of us are all with each other.” She gestures expansively, at the dozen bounty hunters under One’s leadership.

“Cool,” says Ellie. She can’t imagine being into more than one person at a time—she’s probably suffer a seizure—but more power to them. “So what are you guys, um, called?”

“Still deciding,” says Four, brushing tangled black curls out of his eyes. “But my vote’s definitely for _The Twelve_. Twelve’s a powerful number.”

“Dude, we already chose numbers as our new names.” Ten shakes her shaggy head, as if in disappointment. “Gotta be more creative than that. I’m thinking... _The Horned Toads_.” 

“Absolutely not,” her companions reply, in perfect unison.

“Come on, the horned toad is the state reptile of Wyoming!”

“What about _The Twelve Toads?_ ” pipes up Two. 

“Uh, no,” says One, but she’s laughing.

The rest of the evening passes by pleasantly. Ellie’s never been good at making friends, but the people huddled around the campfire before her are...good. Nice. Funny, even. This is the best she’s felt in weeks. Soon she finds herself chuckling along with them. And when she finally does fall asleep, curled up beside Six, her rest is peaceful.

  
  
  



	4. Riley, in the past

She gets shot at a couple of times before it finally clicks. She may not feel like she’s Infected, but she sure as hell must look like it. After running out of range of her sniper friend, Riley wanders into a commercial district. Even after a few decades of apocalyptic wear and tear, it’s obvious this area marks the rich part of town. It’s not the tall panes of glass or the wide boulevards or the once-elegant patios of fancy restaurants that make it clear. It’s the damage. 

Old and clean and precise, the obvious work of uninfected looters during the Great Upheaval, when things were just starting to go to shit. Funny how people back then thought they’d need patented stilettos or gilded wristwatches. Riley looks down at the blurry blob that is her left hand. She has an idea.

…

Her boots crunch over broken glass as she makes her way through a maze of overturned clothing racks. Most of the garments in the store have already been lifted—jackets, jeans, footwear. Whatever this place was, it must have been popular in its day. But most of the accessories were left untouched. She doubles back twice before she finds what she’s looking for: a dust-smeared display case, spattered with old blood.

She lifts the butt of her gun, estimates the amount of force necessary, and smashes it into the glass. Then, very carefully, she reaches in and plucks up a pair of black leather gloves. Thick and sturdy and lined with something soft on the inside. They go up to her elbows, just high enough to cover the worst of the fungal growth. Until she can find better clothes, these will do just fine.

And now comes the hard part. Riley navigates her way into the dressing rooms. She checks each booth for Infected before she slides into the largest. And then, drawing in a fortifying breath, she forces her chin upward and stares into the smudged mirror. She has to stand very close to see the damage done; the infection has rendered her terribly shortsighted. Now, with her 

Her sigh of relief is a deep one. Her face is not as bad as she expected. Neither is the rest of her. She can’t have been in that basement very long. A day or two at most. Her arm, though, is a problem. The bite itself is a double crescent of faintly bioluminescent mush. Her hand won’t fit into the glove as is, and she doesn’t have enough bandages to cover it all. And even if she did, survivors have a funny habit of shooting strangers, especially those with fungal growths poking out of their bloody bandages.

Gritting her teeth, she lifts her left hand and slumps into the nearby bench. Up close, she can see the nodules and cysts and blisters. She yanks her knife free and gets to work.

…

Even hours later, the pain is excruciating. It’s a while before she feels well enough to even move. The fungal growths, evidently, were not keen on going. With each scrape of her blade her agony swelled a thousandfold, like a pustule about to pop. She pulls on the gloves, nearly passing out from the mere brush of leather on her raw and bleeding skin. 

Trying as best she can not to move her left arm, Riley, shoves her right hand into her bag and rummages around for her trusty map. After shit hit the fan, she and Ellie didn’t have much of a plan besides losing their minds together. But Ellie lasted longer than her. Before the infection took over, she looked perfectly fine. She might...she might be okay. She has to be. 

After running off and missing the morning check-in two days in a row, Ellie’s officially out of chances. Unlikely she returned to the military school. She might’ve gone to the Fireflies. Riley can’t be certain, of course, but it’s her best guess. 

She braces her good hand on the edge of the bench and pushes herself upright, tossing her bag back over her shoulder. It’s dark outside now. The moon hangs bright and blurred in the sky, a pale eye staring down at a shattered world. A sudden gust of wind blows through the shop’s broken windows, sending needles of ice into Riley’s exposed skin. Spring has only just started to give way to summer, and the last of Boston’s chill hasn’t even begun to burn off.

Riley takes one step out of the store, and that’s when the alarms go off. She lets out a startled gasp as the metallic screeching fills her ears and reverberates in her skull. 

“Fuck, shit, _fuck,_ ” Riley hisses, grabbing her gun and running for cover.

Already she can hear them, pouring out of dilapidated stores and overgrown streets, all heading straight for her. Bright spots of orange flash in the shadows, hundreds upon hundreds of glowing blind eyes. 

Something hard and bony lands right behind her. She whirls around with a shriek as a bloodied shoulder slams into her chest. The gun goes flying as her back hits the pavement. The Infected screams into her face as she punches wildly at it. One of her frantic kicks lands square in its gut. The creature flops off her, flips back onto its feet and hands, and scrambles off toward the source of the blaring alarms.

A pair of Infected leap from the open doorway behind her—how could she have _missed_ that?—but they too run right past her. And they’re not alone. 

The Infected— _all_ of the Infected—are ignoring her.


	5. Ellie, in the present

“Go to hell,” Ellie snarls, standing up so fast she knocks her stool over. In less than a second, she’s on the other side of the bar shoving Six as hard as she can. He goes stumbling into Five. “I’ve been saving your asses for the past two weeks and this is how you repay me? _Really?_ ”

“You haven’t done shit,” hisses Five, eyes narrowed into dangerous slits. “You’ve just been trailing us like some pathetic stray, begging for scraps it doesn’t deserve.”

“You know what, Five? You’ve been asking for it.” Ellie’s hands curl into fists. She shifts her weight onto her toes. “Well guess what? Today’s your lucky fucking day.”

Six steps forward, hands up and doe eyes pleading. “Five, Ellie, please—”

Ellie throws the first punch. The blow glances Five’s chin. The bounty hunter strikes back, just as fierce, boots thudding over the splintered wooden floor of the tavern. Ellie notices too late that it’s a feint; Five’s fist burrows into her gut. Ellie stumbles back, wheezing.

The patrons of the seedy establishment have begun to take an interest. A woman in frayed suspenders spins around on her barstool, sipping at her frothy, dirt-flecked beer. 

“That all you got?” Ellie sneers.

Five smirks, candlelight flickering in her brown eyes. “That’s all you can take.”

Silence settles as the room stills. Ellie scans the crowd, eyes narrowed. Each and every one of them is staring at her with rapt attention, hooked like a fish. _Good._

A man in faded gray finally breaks the quiet. He roars, “Get her!”

Ellie throws herself forward with a roar, ducking another blow and driving her knee into Five’s kidney. She hisses in pain, swinging the heel of her hand right into Ellie’s ribs. 

“You _fucker_ —”

Everyone freezes when they hear a loud click: the tell-tale sound of a gun’s safety going off. Ellie releases Five’s collar, and they turn around to see Seven press the muzzle of her revolver to the back of Slick Rick’s head. It’s an apt name for myriad reasons—the man is dripping with sweat and oil.

“Don’t nobody even _think_ of moving,” warns Twelve, slipping out from the crusty crowd. To Ellie and Five she cracks a smile and says, “Nice work, y’all. Superb distraction! Y’all could take that show on the road.”

One materializes beside him. She cocks her head at Slick Rick. “You should’ve known better than to steal Ivy’s sheep. She’s not happy, man.”

Slick Rick licks his slimy lips. “Look, One, I’m certain we could arrange some sorta—”

She cuts him off with the sweep of her hand. She looks at Seven and nods once. The gun goes off, and Slick Rick’s greasy grey matter paints the sticky floor.

One smacks Seven upside their head. “You were supposed to knock them out, dumbass.”

They shrug. “The poster said dead or alive.”

…

They spend the night in the same crappy settlement: New Shirley or Shelley or whatever. Their reward is a crate of cheap rum. Back in the good old days people probably wouldn’t use it to clean shoes. But now this stuff’s worth more than gold. (Though so is basically everything nowadays). They’re technically in Idaho, a hundred miles away from Jackson, but whatever. She’s figuring shit out, going wherever the winds of fate take her. Either way, she’s currently too wasted to care very much about how the distance between herself and Dina and JJ grows steadily each and every day. The alcohol sears her throat as it goes down. That’s good. A little more pain means a little less thinking. 

It’s not long before they start trading stories. Eleven recounts the grand tale of how she fought off five grizzly bears (though Two and Ten firmly insist they were just lost cubs). Seven talks about when they finally came out to their parents, only to discover that they were both non-binary too. Eight shares a story about how convinced Nine a cherry tree would grow in his stomach if he swallowed a pit. Ellie tells them about how her dad taught her how to swim by tossing her into a lake. It’s hilarious, even though she almost drowned five times.

She doesn’t mention Joel’s name—she’s not quite there yet, and these guys are still bounty hunters, no matter how nice—but there’s not so much as a flinch, a flicker of hesitation when she speaks about him. She might actually be healing.

When the candle’s have nearly burned out, One sits back and drains the rest of her rum. She looks around the room, her razor-sharp gaze roving over her companions. “My turn.”

Ellie crosses her arms, a smile already touching her lips. Whatever tale One has in store for them, it’ll be good.

“This was back when I was working solo, six or seven years ago,” she begins, voice pitched low. “I was in Missouri, on my way back to Utah to collect on a bounty, when I saw her.”

Four rolls her eyes.

One rubs her hands together. “Recognized her from a poster put out by the Fireflies before they got wiped out.” 

Ellie freezes. 

“Looked just about the same as the picture,” One continues, “save for her long-ass gloves. Fancy things, must’ve looted them from some posh store. Tracked her some ten or so miles through this forest. It was crawling with Runners. Maybe they were survivors who thought they could camp out in the wilderness and just escape the end of things. Poor fools. The Infected move just about as well as anyone.” She rolls her shoulders. “Anyway, I was just about to call it quits. Too many close calls. One time I got cornered by three Shamblers. _Three!_ I was down at the river filling up my canteens when I saw her again. She was on the other side of the water with her own bottles. Gloves still on. She looked at me. I looked at her. She said, ‘I know you’ve been following me.’ I told her I was. She wanted to know why. I told her the Fireflies wanted her dragged in for desertion. And the look on that girl’s face! You know, half of the people I hunt down will play the victim. They’ll pretend to be all surprised and everything. But that girl? Genuine shock. I told her I’d escort her back myself, and maybe I could ask the Fireflies to hear her out. But before she could reply, Infected popped out of nowhere. Runners, Stalkers, Clickers. That same fucking trio of Shamblers. On her side of the river, thank God. And you know what? She just turned around and walked back through all those fuckers. They didn’t even bat an eye at her! Let her through like she was one of their own." She pauses for dramatic effect. "Never saw her again.” 

“Bullshit,” says Three. “Impossible.”

“It’s all true,” One says, pulling a cigarette out of her pocket. She lights it up and puffs at it. “Scout’s honor—Ellie, you okay?”

“Huh?” Her heart’s beating so fast she feels like it might burst out of her ribcage and start tap-dancing on the floor. “What?”

“Looked like you saw a ghost,” says Twelve. “Never had rum before?”

“I’m fine,” says Ellie. She feels wound up, like a guitar string about to snap. “What...what was her name?”

“The bounty?” One purses her lips. “Rachel. Wait, no. It was Riley. Riley Abel.”


	6. Riley, in the past

There are a number of things for which there is no comparison between intellectual knowledge and its practical counterpart. For example, Riley learned in the military school that the average human body contains somewhere around five liters of blood. Didn’t seem like a lot, at the time. It does now.

The walls are painted with gore. Carpets of crimson roll down the flickering hallways. St. Mary's Hospital has undergone some very recent, very fucked up redecorating. Riley creeps through the corridors, gun gripped tightly in her gloved hands. She tries not to gag every time the stench of blood and worse coats her throat and floods her lungs. Sweat has begun to pool under her clothes, plastering cotton and leather to her skin. Whoever did this took their sweet fucking time. 

She steps over Bohai, the man who taught her how to make the best Molotov cocktails. His gut’s been sliced open; his intestines spill across the tile. Adeola’s not far behind. She showed Riley how to track even the smallest game. Yeah, some of these people she never met. But a lot of them were her friends. Her siblings in arms. They had a dream together, and without them all her hope for a better world dries to dust. Each step forward becomes more of a challenge, and not because of the pooling blood alone.

She’s turning a corner when a hand flies out and latches onto her ankle. Riley whips around, finger on the trigger—

“Riley,” Inez chokes out, blood bubbling over her thin lips. “Thank God you’re okay…I knew you didn’t run. I told them, I told them you were gonna come back...”

She drops to the ground by the woman’s side. Almost immediately she feels her comrade’s blood soak the knee of her pants. “What the hell happened here?”

“This monster, he took her—” Inez doubles over, her chest shuddering as she coughs blood. “Did  _ this _ and took her, right out from under us…”

“ _ One _ person did all this?” Riley takes Inez by her trembling shoulders, holding her steady. “Who? Why?”

“This smuggler Marlene hired to bring us this immune girl. Traveled halfway across the country.” Inez lifts one shoulder in a weak half-shrug. “Guess they got close or some shit.”

Riley stiffens. “An immune girl? What were we going to do to her—”

“Rip out the damn fungus and reverse-engineer some sort of vaccine. One life to save millions of others. But that fucker, he...he…”

Riley drags in a deep gulp of air. “What are we supposed to do now, Inez?”

“You come across any survivors?”

Riley shakes her head, fingers curling into fists. 

“Then I want you to hunt down the man that did this.” Inez reaches up, takes Riley’s hands in her own. For a dying woman, her grip is freakishly strong. “Make him pay. And find the girl. She’s humanity’s last hope.”

The emergency alarms kick up again, ringing in time to her thudding heartbeats. “I’ll do what I can,” Riley promises, voice low. “But I have no idea where to start—”

“Find Marlene first,” she gasps out. 

Riley presses her lips together to stop the words from spilling out. She doesn’t have it in her to tell Inez that she saw Marlene on her way in. Or what was left of their leader, at least.

Inez slumps against the wall, and her fingers fall from Riley’s. “The smuggler’s called Joel. Joel Miller. And the girl…” She heaves one last breath. “Her name’s Ellie.”


	7. Ellie, in the present

Ellie tells the bounty hunters she’s leaving the next morning. There’s not a moment to waste. Riley’s  _ alive _ . She fought the infection and won, just as Ellie did. They might be the only people who share the terrible, beautiful gift of immunity. And Ellie locked her in a basement and left her to die. She stares hard at the vista before her: a lush valley burned gold by the sun. It’s the first official day of fall (not that arbitrary units of time mean much anymore), and brittle leaves have already begun to fall. The forest is almost entirely quiet, save for a cricket somewhere in the underbrush, chirping his sweet lullaby. Ellie tries to keep her thoughts nice and calm and neat, but it’s a losing battle. She’s about to slip into yet another bout of angry self-loathing when a hand lands gently on her shoulder. 

One sits beside her on a quilt of leaves. “Are you sure you have to go? We make a good team.” 

Ellie nods, as silent and still as a lake in winter. 

“Too bad. Seven thinks you’re cute.” One’s grin is lazy, her eyes half-lidded.

The words pass right through Ellie. “I...I left her. All alone. I thought—” She manages to pull herself together before she starts sobbing. “She must hate me.”

One’s easy smile slides off her face. “Look, you did the right thing. There was no way you could’ve known she’s immune.”

Ellie’s answering sigh leaves her feeling hollowed-out and fragile. “Everything you said was true?”

“I said Scout’s honor,” One replies, her smile returning as fast as it vanished. She reaches into the deep pockets of her coat. “Here, take this.” She hands over a folded piece of yellowed paper.

Ellie opens up One’s offering. “It’s a map.”

“Your powers of deduction astound me,” the bounty hunter deadpans, rolling her eyes. She points to a thin red line beginning at the edge of Missouri and crossing into Kansas. “This is the path I followed while tracking her.” She taps a blue line. “I had to give up because of all the Infected and took this route around the woods. But she was traveling in a perfectly straight line.”

“My guess is that she was heading for Utah too. There’s a Firefly base—”

“In Salt Lake City.” Ellie grips the map, creasing the paper. “St. Mary’s Hospital.” Riley was looking for her. Even though Ellie abandoned her when she needed her. _ Fuck,  _ she’s so stupid. 

One arches an eyebrow. “How’d you know?”

Because she traveled thousands of miles to get there and help create a cure. Because the Fireflies tried carving her brain up there. Because Joel murdered everyone there to save her otherwise worthless ass. “Uh, Riley and I were planning to join them there.”

Both eyebrows lift now. “When you were fourteen?”

Ellie scrubs a hand down her face. “Yup.”

“Tough cookie.” One bumps her shoulder into Ellie’s “I’ll leave you to your brooding. Just know that we’ll always have a space open for you.” 

She leans over, laying a quick kiss on Ellie’s cheek. Before she can sputter out a response, the bounty hunter rolls to her feet, brushing dead leaves off the back of her legs.

“Be careful out there,” she says. 

And then she’s gone, leaving Ellie staring out into the valley with a hand curled against her cheek.


	8. Riley, in the present

The trail goes cold, and two whole years pass by without any progress. It’s one thing to try to follow the path of a six-foot tall, bearded bounty hunter traveling with a freckled little girl. It’s an odd pair. People remember seeing a duo like that. It’s another thing entirely to attempt tracking a lone woman. The bounty hunter has vanished from the story Riley’s been piecing together, and that makes her job about a million times harder.

But a hunter she chats with (at gunpoint) tells her about this lady who started a slave uprising over in Santa Barbara. After a little encouragement (she kicks him a few times where the sun doesn’t shine), the hunter mentions something about a large tattoo, ferns or something stretching from the lady’s elbow to her hand. 

It’s a shitty lead, as far as leads go. But freeing enslaved survivors seems like a very Ellie thing to do. And the tattoo the hunter describes would cover her bite mark perfectly. So California it is.

Riley is somewhere in the middle of Arizona when she comes across a veritable hord of Infected. Runners, Stalkers, Clickers, even a dozen or so Shamblers. The moaning, groaning mass of half-human, half-fungus corpses isn’t much of a problem for her, though they’re sort of in the way. The horde split up at the end of some vast metropolis, and now her less-conscious brethren are clogging all the streets. She pulls out her map. 

Her sight’s been improving a bit each day. She could definitely still use a pair of glasses, but she’s been able to read for about a year. She spreads out the map on a stretch of concrete and runs her fingers over the network of routes. She’s guesstimating how much time she’ll lose walking around the city when she hears screaming.

Riley sighs heavily. Screaming, for her, is normally a good thing. Infected love screaming. It’s like a bright yellow lamp to a moth. The high-pitched, keening sound attracts her too, albeit to a far lesser extent. It’s just a tug at the edge of her consciousness, an itch she can’t scratch that only gets worse the longer she ignores it. But it’s just an itch. If she moves out of hearing range, she’ll be fine. She doesn’t. The reason she gives into the urge to check out the situation, however, isn’t because she hungers for human flesh. In fact, these days she has to remind herself to eat. No, she jogs over to the sound of blood-curdling screeching because screaming means someone’s about to be very dead, and a very dead person means free stuff. (Though everything else is also technically free, ever since the collapse of the global economy.)

The screamer is a dude around her age with curly black hair and coppery brown skin. He looks so much like her they could be cousins. Maybe that’s why she decides to save him, because she has some sort of subconscious desire for kinship in a world that takes sadistic pleasure in destroying families. Or maybe not. She doesn’t spend very long psychoanalyzing herself. 

He’s standing on top of a stranded school bus, bashing in the heads of the twenty or so Infected attempting to clamber atop the vehicle.

“Stop screaming!” Riley screams.

The guy kicks an Infected off the bus and throws a frantic glance down at her. “How are you—what—”

“I’m immune, and I need you to shut the fuck up.” 

There aren’t any Shamblers, so ticks away her gun, whips out her knife, and gets to work. The Runners and Clickers swarming the bus don’t start struggling until the blade’s deep in their throats. Some of the worse-off ones don’t even resist as she slices through their necks. They just fall in stinking heaps as she carves them up. It’s pathetic and sad and awful. Riley almost starts to feel something dangerously close to pity, but she stomps that sentiment down and grabs the next Runner.

Fifteen minutes later, after all the Infected are dead or dying, the guy whose ass she just saved slides off the bus and lands by her side. 

“Nice gloves.” He sticks out his hand. “I’m Two.”

Riley snorts. “What sort of name is that?” 

“A cool one.” He retracts his hand when she doesn’t shake it. “All the members of my group are named after numbers.”

“Right.” She turns on her heel and begins walking back the way she came.

He follows her. “Hey, where are you going?”

She sighs a long-suffering sigh. “Look, I’m sorry if everyone in your group is dead or something, but I travel alone—”

“They’re all alive, I just went out to scavenge parts.” He runs around her and spreads his arms, blocking her path. “Let me repay you.”

She pushes him aside. “No thanks.”

“We have food.”

“I have my own.” Getting supplies is a walk in the park for her, now that she doesn’t have to worry about Stalkers lurking in the aisles.

His hand falls gently on her shoulder. “Please.”  
She whips around to glare at him; a mistake. He stares down at her with puppy dog eyes. “ _Please._ ”

He doesn’t _seem_ very dangerous. If he were a genuine threat he probably wouldn’t have had to get saved by her in the first place. She could probably take him in a fight.

“Fine,” Riley groans. “Where’s your group?”

…

Two leads Riley to their gang’s hideout, a hollowed-out grocery store with only dirty magazines and creamed corn.

“Hey, guys!” he calls, tugging her toward the half-circle of people inside. “Guess who I ran into!”

“Oh my God,” says a scruffy-looking man. “It’s Riley!”

“Yup!” Two beams. “She’s immune!”

“No way.” A tall, lanky woman looks up from the duffle bag she’s rifling through. “Well, hello—”

“ _You._ ” Riley grabs her gun and scrambles back. She points the firearm at each of the people before her. “You’re all bounty hunters?”

The woman sighs, rising to her feet. She raises her hands in a placatory gesture. “Look, we’re not here for you.” She shrugs. “No more Fireflies, no more bounty to collect. Simple as that.”

After a moment, Riley stows away her gun. “You try anything and I’ll bite you. I’m still Infected. Sort of.”

“Noted.” Two grabs her hand—she barely resists the urge to wrench away her arm and elbow him in the gut—and introduces her to the group.

Six brings out a couple bottles of rum to celebrate the event of Two not dying. After two banged-up cans of corn, more than a few swigs of alcohol, and a blunt Five pulls out of her sweater, Riley finds herself flat on her back, her head pillowed on One’s stomach. She’s still wary, but she’s too comfortable to move.

“So what are you doing all the way out here?” One murmurs. 

“Looking for a friend.”

“Ellie?” asks Three.

Riley sits up, adrenaline slicing through the rum- and weed-induced haze. “How do you know her name?”

“Uh, because we ran into her like three months ago,” sighs Ten. 

“She’s actually looking for you too,” mumbles Twelve. “Didn’t know you were alive until One told her about when y’all met in Missouri.”

“Where is she?”

“I don’t know.” One sits up too and leans against Riley. “But we found her in Wyoming, not too far from Jackson County.”

Riley doesn’t bother pulling out her map. She’s too inebriated to read it anyway. But she visualizes Wyoming as she tips onto her back and folds her arms over her chest. She’s heard of Jackson County before. Supposedly there’s a swanky settlement up there, with electricity and running water. She could get there in three weeks, maybe less.

“You could stay, you know.” One throws her arm around Riley’s shoulders. “An immune lady like you would be more than welcome to join us.” 

“Thanks for the offer,” says Riley, “but I can’t. Ellie...”

“I know.” One yawns. “She turned us down too.”

Six flops beside her. “I really hope you guys find each other.”

  
Riley’s eyes flutter closed. “Me too.”

When the sun rises the next day, so does she. She’s nearing the end of her journey. She can feel it. Knife in her pocket and gun at her back, she says her farewells and sets off into the sunrise.


	9. Ellie, in the present

She’s in Oregon when she comes across a large group of people. She stops to ask them for directions and trade some of what little she has. They’re nomads, which is stupid. And they have kids with them, which is worse. Everyone knows the only possibility of dying old is in a settlement with high walls and lots of ammunition. Traveling with a partner or two is a good idea. Any more than that, and you’re basically a walking feast for Infected. And children—they’re loud and they cry and they’re always so freaking  _ sticky. _

Ellie doesn’t realize she’s crying until one of the youngest kids pats her shoulder and tells her so.

He holds out a doll with sewed-on eyes and straw hair. “Don’t cry,” he tells her, puffing out his round, ruddy cheeks. “It’ll be okay as long as you stay near mommy and daddy and don’t make a single sound.”

Ellie stares at his offering before cradling it in her hands. The doll is nowhere near as cute as Ollie. She returns it to the kid and scrubs away her tears. Fuck, she misses her family. Not that they’re really family, not anymore. She screwed that up royally. She watches the sun sink into the mountains and tries to figure out what the hell she’s doing.

She’s made basically no progress finding Riley. It’s like she slipped right off the face of the Earth after encountering One. And even if they did reunite, what then? They’d run off into the wilderness, hand in hand? No. Ellie doesn’t deserve her, never did. She doesn’t deserve anyone. The tears are falling faster now, faster than she can wipe them away. She can’t do this anymore. If Riley’s out there, Ellie hopes she’s found a good life for herself. She knows the only thing she can offer is death and destruction.

She needs to make amends. Starting with Dina and JJ. And then… Well, she doesn’t much care what happens to her after. She hesitates for a couple days before her guilt wins out. A tide of remorse carries her back to Wyoming, back to Jackson. She pauses at the peak of the hill than looms over the settlement like a giant. Or a tombstone. Whatever. She stopped writing mediocre poetry the day she ran out of things to live for.

A large part of her—most of her actually, wants to turn around and run. But she’s been running her whole life, and God, she’s so fucking tired. So she forces herself down the hill, past the tree stumps marking their little slice of civilization, and to the main gate. She forgets to hide her hand and the guards spend about an hour arguing over whether to shoot her when Maria shows up and yells at them. Then Ellie drags herself past the massive wooden walls and—

She stiffens immediately at the first human contact she’s had in months. 

“Thank God you’re alive,” Maria whispers, releasing her so she can get a good look at her niece in every way but blood.

Ellie doesn’t know what she looks like right now, but it must be bad. Maria’s face falls, her brows drawing up into deep concern. “You’re skin and bones.”

“Maria,” says Ellie. Her voice sounds like two jagged stones being ground together. “Look, I’m sorry—”

“No.” Maria shakes her, and not very gently either. “ _ No. _ You’re home. That’s all that matters.”

“But I—”

“I have soup on the stove. Come eat, and then we’ll talk.” Maria offers her a thin smile. “Please.”

Ellie’s hurt her enough. The absolute least she can do is force food down her throat. “Okay. Thank you.”

And so she finds herself in Maria’s kitchen, a bowl of steaming barley and bean stew before her. Maria half-glares at her until she starts eating.

“Tommy won’t be back until late.” The older woman tucks into her own meal, dipping a hunk of bread into the soup. “Out hunting.”

It’s probably for the best. Ellie doubts she could face him now without splitting at the seams. 

“I shouldn’t have left,” she says, and her voice is far smaller than she’d like it to be. 

“There’s no way to know if you made the right decision or not.” Maria shrugs, a little heave of her shoulders. “There are only choices, and you’ve already made them. You did leave, but now you’re back.” Her gaze sharpens. “One foot in front of the other, hun. That’s all any of us can ever do.”

...

Ellie finds Dina curled up under an oak tree with one of her journals. Shit _._ Maybe she _should_ have burned the farmhouse down. She certainly feels like _she’s_ on fire.

Dina flips a page, not deigning to look up at Ellie, who suspects her face is somewhere between bright pink and tomato red at the moment.

“I always look happy in your drawings,” Dina says. And now her gaze flies upward, pinning Ellie where she stands.

“I guess you weren’t, then.”

Dina pats the spot next to her, and Ellie drops down as if she’s a puppet whose strings have been cut. 

“Neither of us were,” Dina says, handing Ellie her journal. “I think...we both needed space to figure out who we are on our own.” Her smile is small, and so very sad. “And now that we know…” 

Ellie sighs. She knew this was coming. “You don’t think we should be together anymore.”

Dina throws her head back and laughs. The sound is so startling and so sweet it brings tears to Ellie’s eyes.

“I was definitely  _ not  _ going to say that.” She links their arms together. “I’m not that savage. Jesus.”

“But I’m right, aren’t I?”

Dina takes Ellie’s cold, calloused hand in her warm, soft ones. “What about you?” 

Ellie cocks her head. 

“What do  _ you  _ think?” Dina presses. 

Ellie lets out a shuddering breath. “I still don’t want to lose you. Or JJ.” 

Dina surges forward suddenly, wrapping Ellie into a hug so strong she feels like her ribs might snap. “Good.” She pulls away, after a moment. “You haven’t lost us, and you never will. You’ll always be family, Ellie. Things are different now, not worse.” 

Ellie ducks her head, sucking in a breath. “Thank you.” 

The corner of Dina’s mouth tilts up into a half-smile. “What for?” 

“Everything. For being so good to me, when I never deserved it.”

Dina tugs her into another unexpected, bone-crushing embrace. “Ellie, you deserve the world.”

She doesn’t bother arguing. Dina’s always been able to run circles around her.

Dina settles back against the tree. “So when do you head out again?” 

Ellie tenses. “I wasn’t planning on—” 

“Oh, come on. You have that look in your eye.” Dina cups Ellie’s jaw in her palm. “I hope you find what you’re looking for.” 

“Yeah.” Ellie places her own fingers over Dina’s. “Me too.”


	10. Riley, in the present

Riley wakes up in her little camp, which is normal. The young, dark-haired woman lobbing pebbles at her foot is decidedly not. There’s also a dude a couple feet away, hands on his hips.

“What...the fuck is wrong with you?” Riley hisses, throwing herself to her feet.

“You’re officially in Jackson County,” says the young woman, the corner of her lips quirked up into a lazy half-smile. She’s perched on a large rock under a gnarled, age-old tree, and the light coming through the leaves makes her look like some sort of woodland creature.

Riley notices belatedly that there’s a gun in the hand that’s not throwing pebbles. The grip is loose, relaxed. A subtle threat, but one she knows better than to ignore.

“I know,” says Riley. She narrows her eyes. “Are you from the settlement? I thought it was open to all travelers.”

“It is,” says the guy, picking brittle brown leaves out of his braided hair. “Just not to possibly Infected ones—”

“Nick,” snaps the woman. “I’m handling this.”

Nick’s mouth thins into an irritated, embarrassed line. “Whatever, Dina.”

When Dina turns around again, her scowl flips back into that easy, self-assured smile. “The dipshit’s right, though. We take out bitten people if they get too close to the settlement.” A finger taps against the hilt of her gun. “I suggest you turn around and go back the way you came.”

“I’m not—” Riley looks down at her hands. All her tossing and turning during the night pushed her left glove nearly down to her wrist. Just over the thick hem is a patch of pale orange-gray. “Well, fuck.”

“Yeah.” Dina’s brows scrunch up sympathetically. “Sorry, bud.”

Riley takes a step forward. “Look—”

“Get back!” A crossbow materializes in Nick’s hands. “You—”

“Put that thing away,” Dina orders. Her voice is as sharp as an arrow. 

“But—”  
“Put it away,” Dina hisses, “or I’ll tell Maria all about your little fuckup on our last patrol.”

Nick’s face goes through an impressive array of expressions, each appearing and vanishing too fast for Riley to read. But in the end all that matters is that he lowers the crossbow (though slowly, and with his right eyebrow twitching).

“I’m immune,” says Riley.

Nick rolls his eyes. “Yeah, right.” 

“Say another word and see what happens,” Dina says cheerily. To Riley she says, far more seriously, “I think I know who you are.”

Riley tenses, ready to make a run for it. “How?”

Dina’s smiling fully now. “Ellie. She told me  _ all  _ about you.” 

Riley stumbles back, each word hitting her like a hatchet blow. For one awful moment, she can’t breathe. Then the damp forest air floods her lungs and she sucks in one deep, trembling gulp. “Ellie?” she echoes.

Dina nods once. “Yup. Can’t believe I didn’t recognize you, Riley. She draws you almost as much as Potato.” She turns on her heel. “Follow me. I’ll take you to her.”


	11. Ellie, in the present

She’s nearly done packing. All that’s left to do is decide whether she wants to take the guitar or not. It’s heavy as all hell, and relearning how to play the instrument with two missing fingers is a pain in the ass. But she’ll get the hang of it. Eventually. She’s just finished a painstakingly slow rendition of ‘Take On Me’ when a knock sounds at the door.

Ellie considers ignoring it. But it’s probably Dina—who is she kidding? It has to be, no one else comes to visit her—so she puts down the guitar and heads downstairs. 

She twists the handle and opens the door. “Hey, what’s—”

The words die in the back of her throat the second she sees her. 

“Hey, New Kid,” says Riley. Her voice is lightly teasing, but there are tears in her eyes.

“Oh my God,” Ellie chokes out and shit, now she’s crying too. “You’re here—I...I was just going to head out and—”

Riley throws her arms around her. 

When Ellie regains control of her limbs, she hugs her back, just as tightly. “I’m so fucking sorry,” she sobs. “I didn’t know you were immune, and—and I couldn’t hurt you, I’m such a—”

Riley shushes her gently. “It’s okay.”

Ellie’s practiced this apology a thousand times, between bloody flashbacks and panic attacks and horrifying nightmares. Not once did she stop to think that Riley might forgive her, and so easily. God, she’s so stupid. It’s  _ Riley.  _

“I missed you,” Riley says.

Ellie draws back, just enough to get a good look at her. She’s alive and healthy and so fucking gorgeous it hurts. “I missed you more.”

Riley smiles. “Agree to disagree.” 

Ellie feels like her heart’s about to burst in her chest, but in a good way. Part of her wonders how it’s possible for her to feel anything remotely pleasant after everything that’s happened, everything she’s done. The other, larger part is busy melting into a puddle as Riley takes her wounded hand in hers. Her hold on Ellie is painfully gentle.

Ellie lifts Riley’s fingers to her lips and kisses the knuckles. “Please come inside,” she says. “I’ll play you a song.”

Riley laughs, wiping away tears with her free hand. “But you have shit taste in music.”

“Yeah.” Ellie leads her over the doorstep. “I know.”


	12. To be continued...

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A little update :)

Hello friends! 

I hope you're all doing well, considering everything. I have some good news! I'll be continuing this fic, with Chapter 12 releasing with the first episode of The Last of Us TV show in 2021! If you have any suggestions, advice, feedback, questions, or concerns, please share them in the comments below! And if there are specific tropes you'd like to see in the future, let me know.

\- desertplanet


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